Municipal Homepages should be a meeting point to citizens for regional information and communication. With the aspect of communication, the municipal homepage attract the citizens to visit local municipal websites regularly. As an effect, the frequent return to the municipal websites by the citizens creates the potential to gather actual information to chat about it. Whether citizens have the occasion of interactive attendence the veritable service capability of a municipal homepage will evolve.

In partnership with the borough of Modautal, Germany, a municipal homepage with particitipation of citizens was implemented. Based on open-source technology a content-management-system with integrated community features was built. Administration secretaries can publish information from different ressorts very easy. Multiple occasions for discussion and comments are presented to citizens.

Community features of the program for citizens are:

• Comments to current articles.
• Valuation of articles.
• Discussion groups to every day stories, like school, clubs, the borough, politics etc.
• Calendar with WYSIWYG editing features for citizens to fashion events, invitations etc.
• Forming of opinions in surveys.
• Internal e-mail system closed communication between citizens.
• Marcetplace by classifieds.
• Guestbook.
• Recommendation and greeting cards.
• Electronic forms.
• Prepared for secure communication.

System use for administrators and publishers is very simple:

• Fully web-based administration.
• WYSIWYG-Editor for content editing.
• Detailed configuration of discussion forums including closed groups.
• Creation and distribution of newsletters.
• Role management for authors and publishers.
• Easy configuration of information blocks and menus.
• Easy extendable on a module basis.

Advances:

• Overall, additional publishing costs of 1 hour per week as to paper based publishing.
• Administration secretaries can handle the publish process as to html programming by a dedicated administrator.
• Open to integration of future e-government processes.
• More information exchange with citizens.

The system is based on the open-source content-management-system phpNuke that had to be extended and configured. Cross Development serves the technical attendance and hosting. The exceptional content-management experience of Cross Consulting was a great help.

The concept can equally be attached to schools and other public institutions as well as to any homepages with high communicative character.

On interest, we offer hosting plans and consulting. Please use the contact form for your inquiry. We come back to you soon.